Today’s practice of worshipping at the cult of the leadership personality strikes me as a bit odd and thin. I'm sure that Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are all good leaders but I am not convinced their achievements are all due to the efforts of one exceptional individual. The ‘cult of personality’ in leadership writing has a long pedigree that in these uncertain times seems to be making a strong comeback. 

It is a story easily told, and one that taps deeply into our desire for stories where the hero battles against the odds to achieve victory. There are setbacks along the way (we may lose loved companions) and there is luck (a chance encounter that gives hope) but in the end the hero (often from humble beginnings) triumphs over adversity. In the end, the grateful populace celebrates the hero and looks forward to the future with renewed hope. All good.

What I do find a little strange is how many of the insights provided by today’s leaders are provided to us less than halfway through their journey. But they are presented as if the story of triumph and greatness was complete. Steve Jobs contribution is complete, I would suggest that Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership journey has barely begun and leadership legacy of Jeff Bezos cannot yet be seen. 

The 'loneliness of command' is another leadership trope that I find odd. Leaders are accountable and responsible for decision-making, at some point someone has to decide. Fair enough. However, is that the same as 'loneliness'? Again, it reinforces the leadership as an isolated and individual pursuit.   

Many famous and proven leaders hold these views and have written extensively from their own experience to reinforce how one passionate leader can change the course of events and on the experience of loneliness at the top. I don’t discount these views and experiences, I’m just not convinced they advance our understanding of leadership much. 

The 'cult of personality' and the 'loneliness of command' reinforce the Great Man Theory of leadership made popular by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s. It is a theory with a rich and deep pedigree. In short, it is the view that history can be largely explained by the impact of great ‘men’, or heroes, who due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill used their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. History is told through the deeds of great individuals and we learn the lessons of leadership by studying and mimicking their traits, characteristics and dispositions. If I try to be more like Jack Welch, then I too will have some modicum of Welch’s success as a leader.  

The Great Man theory has not been without its critics. Tolstoy's epic War and Peace is a largely a rejection of the Carlyle’s observations. For Tolstoy, the great individuals are function of convenient storytelling in history. 

In ancient times, says Tolstoy, great events were described the activity of individuals who ruled the people, and regarded the activity of those men as representing the activity of the whole nation. The question was: how did individuals make nations act as they wished and by what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? The answer: these individuals were chosen, and their actions were guided by a Deity and were predestined for success. For Tolstoy, ‘Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles’. However, having in theory rejected this view, we still follows it in practice, Tolstoy:

“Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly guided by the will of God, modern history has given us either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of very various kinds, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses.” 

While the leadership of the heroic and famous are important in history it is likely they less important than we are led to believe in the stories we tell about them. History and events are not solely determined by the will and actions of important people. 

The philosopher William James in his lecture ‘Great Men and Their Environment’ stressed the importance of the alignment between leader and the environment. James’s point is that environments and leaders shape each other reciprocally.

However, despite the criticism, the Great Man view of leadership is a meme that has sunk deep roots and remains in the foundations of how we think about leadership today. 

For some time now, I have thought leadership might be practised by complementary pairs of people. In particular, I was wondering whether 'creative leadership' came from these complementary pairs. I need to separate out what I mean by creative leadership. 

While there is always a need for the efficient management of the day-to-day, this is not the leadership where new ideas come from or where business model innovation arises. The glut of leadership and management books and education target the day-to-day. 

Interestingly, there has been a lot of speculation about whether the massive investment in leadership development is having the desired effect of improving the quality of leadership. In 2014, Development Dimensions International (DDI) identified that an estimated $50 billion was spent on leadership development in 2014 and that number is on the rise. However, the number of organisations that feel they have the supply of leaders to meet their needs three years out was going down. The perceived quality of leadership was considered stagnant and did not reflect the increased investment in development. 

More recently, but in a similar vein, others have questioned whether the understanding of leadership as ‘sets of competencies’ has led to an industrial production that is stamping out leaders like so many interchangeable parts. It is leadership abstracted to trite statements that are neatly packaged for easy consumption. 

To add weight to the observation, Jeffrey Pfeffer, who has written extensively on leadership over the years, expresses a similar view as the central premise of his recent book ‘Leadership B.S.: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time’:

‘…one of the things I look at is how much money we have spent on leadership development and leadership education, and how many books and blogs and posts and TED talks there are, and how dismal most workplaces are. The evidence certainly suggests that the leadership industry has completely failed to improve; first of all the conditions of the workplace, but secondly, in many instances the careers of leaders, because leaders are also losing their jobs at an unacceptably high rate.’

The burning question in all this is why are we persisting with the same understanding of leadership and leadership development? 

I have become diverted from my main task. Essays can be like that sometimes. However, to make the connection: first, the Great Man theory is alive and well in the bedrock of our understanding of leadership, and it’s not helping; and second, we are not seeing value from our investment in our leadership development, I think, because it continues to tap into this faulty foundation. We are not advancing our understanding of leadership and its practice; rather, we are repeating the same leadership stories with new characters. 

If you are still reading, the next bit is on a thought I have been harbouring for some time on the sources of ‘creative leadership’. Mostly, this sees the effectiveness of leadership as relationship between ‘pairs’ rather than individual competence. This is not a fully formed thought on my part, just an observation that has been brewing over time.

I think less thought seems to have been applied to the sources of 'creative leadership'. The leadership that initiates and changes. The leadership that creates the new and destroys the old. It is the leadership that delivers innovation. 

I came to this observation by reading history—military and political. It seemed to me that as I was reading about ‘great leaders’ there often seemed to an important relationship between the leader and another person. In the best cases, these were complementary leadership pairs.  

While the historical or descriptive focus was on one part of the pair, the other seemed crucial to success. The other person in the pair was not just a support act to a ‘great leader’ but rather a central part of a pair that decided and acted in a complementary way. Consistent with the Great Man approach, the public credit for leadership goes to one part of pair but the history suggests that both were important and necessary in achieving success. One without the other was like an extinct volcano, lots of latent potential but no eruption that changes the landscape. 

For example, the leadership relationship between General George C. Marshall and General Ike Eisenhower during World War II seems to me to be an example of this type of pairing. As I read about the way they worked together I was not struck by the 'loneliness of command' but rather by complementary nature of their relationship and how it gave rise to creativity in their approach to problem solving. 

The relationship in complementary pairs I saw were always open, honest and frank. The skill sets, outlooks and approaches each brought to the pair were often different but there was a shared view of what was important. 

If I were capture in a neat leadership bromide of the sort I was arguing against earlier, the capabilities of the pair were some mix of thinking, action and connection. 

I have wondered whether leadership pairs offer a safe and confined place to think out loud, to test approaches, and to be emotive while tasks are executed in a structured way through hierarchy. One or other of the pair was thinking while the other was orchestrating the execution of the tasks in a complementary way. The roles could shift but in each case the pair worked in a complementary way to achieve the shared outcome. Does the leadership pair provide a place for imagination and creativity that is a necessary part of leadership prior to the process of getting stuff done? 

So, to confirm my bias I went looking for other examples of pairs outside my usual reading and came stories of creative pairs in other fields. I have picked a couple of quotes from those pairings that reflect my understanding (and experience of) complementary leadership pairs.

• “Charlie does the talking. I just move my lips.” Warren Buffett on his business partner, Charlie Munger

• “When we were together we bent our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the moment of parting we still thought as one.” Simone de Beauvoir on Jean-Paul Sartre

• “He was for long my only audience ... But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought [The Lord of the Rings] to a conclusion.” J. R. R. Tolkien on C. S. Lewis

• “I would try my hardest to do what he wanted and dance well, and he would be the only judge, relieving me of having to criticize myself.” The dancer Suzanne Farrell on the choreographer George Balanchine

• “All things considered, there is only Matisse.”  (Pablo Picasso); “Only one person has the right to criticize me. That is Picasso.” (Henri Matisse)

These quotes offer different aspects of a creative leadership relationship. I’m not offering this as a new ‘theory of leadership’—we don't need any more of those. These are some random observations from one person on why there may be more to understanding the conditions for good leadership that go beyond our fondness for worshipping at the altar of personality or endlessly listing the competencies of a ‘good leader’. 

I tend to think about organisations (and the exercise of leadership) as a problem of how you generate social order from individual self-interest. I often reflect on the following observation by Dennis Wrong: 

Society is nothing but a web of social relations that is constantly being spun, broken, and spun again, invariably in a slightly different form … This entire process is in no sense willed or even fully foreseen by either party. It is sui generis resultant of their recurrent situated interaction. Whatever the needs, motives, and interests underlying this interaction, its continuation has precipitated mutually binding sets of expectations.

If our organisations are spun from ongoing interactions and relationships, then the idea of creative leadership emerging from complementary pairs interacting over time in a constant cycle of learning and acting may have some merit. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

[The views expressed here are my own and are not necessarily representative of those employing me, my family, or even those loosely acquainted with me.]

Sources
Great Man Theory

Thomas Carlyle’s original lectures: ‘On Heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history’, 1840

Thomas Carlyle, On Great Men, 1996, (Penguin)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace II, Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Edited by Henry Gifford, ‘Second Epilogue’, Oxford University Press, 1983, [1867]

William James, ‘Great Men and Their Environment’, A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 46, no. 276, October 1880, pp. 441—459. 

Development Dimensions International (DDI), Ready Now Leaders: 25 Findings to meet tomorrow’s business challenges, Global Leadership Forecast 2014-15.

Eric J. McNulty, Leadership Development’s Epic Fail, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2017  

Jeffery Pfeffer, Leadership B.S: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, 2015

Jeffery Pfeffer quote from: ‘Trouble at work: Jeffrey Pfeffer on fixing leadership failure’, 2014

Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, 2013

The quotes come from: Joshua Wolf Shenk, Creative Pairs, in Their Own Words: Members of creative pairs on their partners, 2014

The book on creative pairs: Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, 2014 

A look at a specific creative pairing: Joshua Wolf Shenk, ‘The Power of Two: Despite the mythology around the idea of the lone genius, the famous partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney demonstrates the brilliance of creative pairs’, 2014

Dennis Wrong, The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society?, 1994